Everyone wants to be safe. Your parents, your friends, even Mr Bobbins from down the street. Everyone. And that goes double on teh Internets of course. ‘Cos we all know how dangerous it is out there, with all those mafia types just aching to get hold of your digital Smurf card collection and worse.

SafeIP (not to be confused with SafeIP Hider) is a new free program which aims to let you surf without revealing your IP address, thereby preventing ugly people from swooping in on black helicopters to do their worst with you and family.

We tried it with a couple of the country options, the US and Poland, and found that it did indeed mask your IP address when we checked with whatsmyip.org. The software however doesn’t let us access Hulu.com, which we assume is either a bug or a trawl for the paid version We did manage to watch Jon Stewart for a while, probably as a taster, with the settings switched to fast content streaming, which implies it works quite well if you pay up.

Even though it looks as though you need to pay to access premium streaming content, the free tool should be a useful tool to have on your machine just in case you’re worried about sites you may visit, especially since you can shield your WiFi MAC address, your URL referrer to stop people seeing where you came from, and your browser fingerprint.

It’s also really interesting to visit the BBC page and see how the news changes depending on the IP you use. Definitely worth a bookmark.